


it's the quiet night that breaks me

by metonymy



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-01
Updated: 2015-02-01
Packaged: 2018-03-09 23:05:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3267677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metonymy/pseuds/metonymy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kitty has been having the dreams as long as she can remember. She doesn't understand why she keeps dreaming of a different world - a world where mutants are feared and hated, where Sentinels hunt them down. And she doesn't know how to make the dreams stop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's the quiet night that breaks me

**Author's Note:**

> Incorporates elements from the first X-Men trilogy of films and occasional references to the comics.

Kitty is a girl, a computer whiz, a nerd, Jewish, and a mutant. She's known about that last one for about a week. She got a headache and fell through her bedroom floor and she's pretty lucky she didn't break her hip. That's what her grandfather said, anyway.

Her mom cried a little, but got over it really fast. Not because her daughter is different - because even after everything mutants have done they're still outsiders, and because she doesn't want Kitty to have a harder life. Kitty is pretty sure her life will be okay, but she really didn't want to deal with her mom crying because that was weird. Her dad was way more calm about it, talking about how they could put Kitty in a mutant program at school, but Kitty really doesn't want to drop the gifted and talented classes and she doesn't know how she'll have time for it all, and this is what's whirling through her head when she lies down and tries to sleep.

_Kitty is a girl, a computer whiz, a Jew, and a mutant. She fell through her bedroom floor and felt no pain. Just fear._

_Her mother cried, and her father closed all the curtains and paced while they tried to figure out what to do. Kitty still looked normal for now, after all, and they didn't want her to be teased or bullied or hurt or far worse. Or taken away and never seen again._

_Kitty sits in her bedroom, on the floor because she can't trust the bed, arms wrapped around her knees as she worries, until she hears the sound of a car outside. When she peeks over the windowsill it's an unmarked van, and she ducks back down and curls up even smaller until she hears her dad's voice from downstairs._

_When she peers around the door she sees a balding man in a wheelchair and a black woman with long white hair waiting outside the front door._

_< <Hello,>> she hears inside her head. <<I'm Charles. And we're here to help.>>_

_She's so surprised she falls through the door._

It turns out that the mutant classes are beside the point. A few days later, her dad calls her downstairs, and Kitty manages to walk through her door on the second try and comes down the stairs to find a man and a woman waiting for her.

"Miss Pryde?" the man asks, and he seems familiar to her somehow. The woman beside him is beautiful and strange with her snow-white hair, and Kitty feels like she's seen her before, too. But she pushes that feeling down, because they're talking to her about the opportunity to go to a special school. A school for mutants, where she'll be able to learn about her powers and how to use them best as well as take an accelerated curriculum. 

"Why me?" she asks, looking at the man - Xavier, he said his name was. "I mean, there must be lots of mutants who want to come to the school. Why did you come to find me?"

He gives her a smile, his eyes bright. "Not so very many, Miss Pryde. And you - you have an exceptional talent. One that must be harnessed."

"I just fall through things," she protests. 

The woman beside him - Ororo? - turns to Kitty, setting down the glass of lemonade in her hand with a decisive clink. "Your powers can be much more than that. And the Xavier School will teach you how."

"But she'll still get a regular education?" her mother asks, a nervous twang in her voice. "She can go to college?"

There's a pause. "Our students have attended many fine institutions," the professor says. "We find our teachers are wonderful educators as well as understanding of the unique challenges of teaching a somewhat unconventional student body."

Kitty has a more important question. "Will I still get to take dance lessons?"

Ororo laughs. "Yes. We will make sure you can dance."

Kitty still has dreams after she goes to the school, and she figures they're mostly normal. It's not like life at Xavier's is totally stress-free, anyway. Of course she'd have bad dreams. And they're not all bad. Sometimes it's just about the same kinds of things she's been doing, training and meeting people and prank wars and stupid fights and piling into the den to watch movies. Some people are missing - Professor Logan never shows up, and Rogue doesn't seem to be there until partway through her second year, and nobody even talks about Mr. Lehnsherr when he's at the school every couple of months - but Kitty doesn't think about them that hard. She's too busy focusing on her classes, on learning how to work on the mainframes and the Danger Room programming with Doctor McCoy, and on squeezing in time to dance.

There's never any dancing in her dreams.

_She wakes up in the middle of the night to the sound of shouting. Footsteps outside, heavy, and she's just barely opened her eyes when the door crashes against the wall and men are piling into her room._

_It's all reflex to phase, to fall through the bed and the floor and tuck herself so she lands lightly on her feet, to go running. She can hear screams, confusion making the halls echo, and she sees her friends trying to get out, and Kitty grabs Jubilee and Tabitha and keeps running, pulling them through the wall and out into the woods and past the enormous dark shapes of the Sentinels, praying none of the robots will follow their heartbeats._

_She doesn't stop running for a long time._

It's just a nightmare, she tells herself in the morning. It doesn't mean anything. Mutants aren't exactly beloved, but it's not as bad as all that. They're not being hunted down - they learned in Mutant History about the aborted Sentinel program and the mutant rights movement - and certainly no one would ever dare attack the school. Not with Professor Xavier consulting with Congress, with the legendary Mystique and the man whispered about as Magneto visiting and staying for weeks at a time. And not with so many powered adults and teenagers on the premises. It'd be suicide.

Kitty keeps telling herself this, even as she dreams about Dr. Grey being lost under the waves of a lake, as she wakes up with tears in her eyes and the memory of a scream in her throat at the news. She pokes her head into Jean's office the next day and tries to smile back when the older woman greets her cheerily.

"What is it, Kitty?" she asks.

And Kitty tries very hard not to think _I dreamed you died trying to save everyone, and you did but you were still dead_ and thinks instead about a plausible excuse, because Jean is very good about not reading people's thoughts unless she has permission. "Oh, I just had some questions about the homework," Kitty says instead, and asks about the genetics sequencing they were talking about in class, and it makes it easier to breathe when she leaves the office and heads outside into the sunshine.

 

Her dreams get worse, though, even as her life gets better, even as she becomes closer friends with Rogue and goes on day trips with the whole school into the city and learns to drive with Logan beside her and Bobby offering useless tips from the back seat and covers herself in dirt while helping Ororo in the gardens. They get so dark that Kitty starts wondering if there's something wrong with her. She wakes up one day to a soaked pillow and vague memories of Jean returning, of Scott dying and the Professor left for dead, of the whole school mourning and cracked at the center. That dream sticks with her all day, all the way into her lessons at Stevie's and the long ride back to the school, makes her quiet at dinner and retreat to her room like she used to when she was new at the school and homesick.

The dreams get worse and worse that week, and she starts staying up later in hope that she'll be too exhausted for her mind to produce any of the images, but it doesn't seem to help. She thinks of happy thoughts, of the stuffed dragon Piotr won for her at the arcade and the plans Ororo's making for a beach vacation and Jubilee's plot to get them all concert tickets and her mother's hamentaschen mailed all the way from Illinois, but none of it does any good.

_The air around them is charged and heavy and walking through it is like swimming through sludge. It's not just Ororo's storm overhead, the sky thick and roiling and growling with thunder. It's that creature behind them, the one looking out of Jean Grey's face with dark eyes and bottomless rage. Kitty hangs onto Leech's hand and hauls him across the broken ground, over the bodies of fallen mutants and soldiers, past the pieces of what used to be Sentinels, knowing there's no time to stop and check for fallen friends. The Phoenix is tearing the island apart._

_Some part of Kitty's mind wonders if her powers would save her from the disintegration, if phasing would protect her or if her very atoms would be ripped apart. It doesn't matter anyway. She can't leave Leech behind, and she can't hold him and phase, and she can't stop running._

_The noise stops for a moment, so sudden it makes Kitty stumble, and she shoves Leech to keep running even as she falls to her knees. She can't stop herself from turning to look back, like the old myths. Logan has his claws extended and she knows what is going to happen and she can't catch her breath to scream. All she can do is watch as he stabs the Phoenix, as Jean falls forward into his arms._

_The air grows calm, and Kitty cries._

She heads downstairs after that one, phasing through the door and out into the garden, curling up on a bench where a headstone stood in her dreams. Spring nights are often chilly in New York but she barely realizes how hard she's shivering until a leather jacket is draped around her shoulders and the bench creaks beside her.

"Past your bedtime," Logan observes. 

"Like you care," she snaps back. But she tugs the jacket a little closer around her, inhaling the scent of tobacco and gasoline. She's going to need a shower later, but right now it's perfect. 

They sit in silence for a while. Logan's never been one for asking the students flat out what's wrong with them. And Kitty doesn't feel like volunteering her worries right now. 

"How do you know if your powers are changing?" she asks finally, staring up at the stars. 

"Sounds like a question for Xavier," he says. There's the catch and tiny hiss of his lighter, the brief flare of flame illuminating his face as he lights his cigar. "Mine never changed. Kind of the point." For a moment all she can see is that face from the dream ripped apart by the Phoenix's power. Kitty closes her eyes and shakes her head. "Something wrong, kid?"

"Bad dreams," she says finally. "But they - they're so _real_ , and terrible things happen in them, and I keep thinking - what if it's precognition? Except everything's different. So I don't know how they'd even happen." 

"Already said that sounds like a question for Chuck." Logan glances over at her and raises an eyebrow. "Don't worry about it till you talk to him. And even then, they're probably just bad dreams." 

"Well. Thanks," Kitty says, her voice a little flat, and Logan chuckles and puts a hand on her shoulder. 

"Don't mention it. You gonna stay out here long, or can I have my jacket back?"

"No take-backs," she says automatically, sliding her arms into the too-long sleeves. She's smiling now, which probably wasn't Logan's plan. He never really has a plan. But she sits out there with him in the quiet, slowly leaning against him and drifting off to the sound of the wind in the bushes and the smell of his cigar. 

The dreams aren't so bad for a while after that. Kitty manages to start sleeping again without lying awake for hours. Which is good, because soon enough she's dealing with college applications and arranging the carpool to go take the SAT at the local public school and trying to figure out how to ask for objective recommendations from teachers who are really some of her best friends. Along with all that, she's still finishing all her classes and seeing whether she can get college credit for them. It's a shock when she realizes she's technically done most of the first two years of a computer science degree in her years at Xavier's. 

Her dad's pulling for her to come back to Chicago, but in the end she goes with Columbia. Kitty's well and truly transplanted now. Besides, they have some really fascinating mutant rights courses in the pre-law catalogue, and she's kind of interested in that. For obvious reasons. Maybe that'll be a way to handle her dreams as they start to appear again. At this point she figures it's stress, her worst fears realized and dragging up warnings from her childhood to make them seem even more terrifying, but that doesn't make it any easier to confront them. It doesn't make her eager to lie down in the darkness and close her eyes and wait for the nightmares to start. 

_After the battle of Alcatraz, the fringe's calls for a solution to the "mutant problem" find traction. There's overwhelming support for segregation, for internment, especially of the vigilantes who were present for the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge and the deaths of American soldiers on American soil. Kitty and a team are sent to erase all records of those present on the island that day, but it doesn't turn the tide of public opinion. She watches the news reports and the broadcasts of the special sessions of Congress and hears the echoes of her grandfather's stories and feels sick to her stomach._

_And yet nobody really believes it when the new Sentinels are dispatched, when the order goes out that certain undesirable elements are to report for questioning and possible containment._

_But this time, when they run, the Sentinels are waiting. This time Kitty's too slow and she's caught off guard and a dart finds her in a split second when she isn't phased._

_This time she finds herself locked away behind barbed wire, a collar snapped around her neck, an ache in her head and her body frustratingly solid._

_She throws herself at the walls of her cell until her body is bruised. Only then does she start to cry._

Kitty finds herself downstairs before dawn, sitting in the kitchen with a cup of coffee that she can't bring herself to drink, wondering whether she's really losing it this time. 

"I didn't think you were this eager to leave us, Kitty," the Professor says, and she looks up with a jerk, nearly knocking the cup over. He wheels into the room and looks at her calmly.

"No, I wasn't… I couldn't sleep," she says, her voice sounding small. And scared. 

"Nervous?" His smile is reassuring, eyes warm, and Kitty tries not to think about the dream where he was lying broken and lost in a hospital bed. "You'll do well, you know. You adapted to the school far more quickly than you thought you would. College will be just the same."

Kitty bites her lip, not knowing what to say. It's not college she's afraid of - she's proud of being different, proud of who she is, proud of her intelligence and her skills and her powers. It's the stupid simple normality of falling asleep that scares her. It's not knowing whether she's going to wake up her roommate with screams.

"I keep having these nightmares," she says finally, staring into her coffee. "And they're all connected, and they're all… not the same, but like they're from the same story. Where everything's wrong. And they seem so real, and they're all part of the same dream, and I know I don't score above baseline on the psychic scale, but I don't know what they _are_ and I don't know how to make them stop." Kitty stops herself, knowing her voice is getting higher and feeling the hot prickle of tears in her eyes, not wanting to cry in front of the Professor.

"Kitty." His voice is soothing as a blanket tucked over her knees, and when she looks back up he seems concerned but not scared or upset or anything. Of course he isn't. Or if he is he wouldn't show it, would he? He runs the whole school. "You know I normally don't look into my students' minds, but - if it would put you at ease… may I?"

Whether that's true or not is a subject of open debate and has been as long as she's been here. But he's asking, or offering. And he might be able to tell her whether she really is going crazy. "Do you need me to concentrate on the dreams?"

"It would help if you are focused," he says, so Kitty closes her eyes as he places his fingertips at her temples and thinks about the dreams, the years of turmoil and fear condensed into her nightmares, the attacks and the deaths and the robots and the hatred and anger, all the way up to the one that ended just an hour ago and still seems as fresh as her cup of coffee. 

"Interesting," the Professor says. Kitty opens her eyes, feeling fuzzy-headed and exhausted and struggling to remember if she felt that way before she sat down with him. 

"What?"

"These nightmares, as you're calling them. They don't present like ordinary dreams - you're familiar with the stages of sleep and the REM cycle?"

Kitty shrugs. She's heard of it, maybe, but she doesn't know a lot about it. The Professor continues. "If you were merely having nightmares these would have the texture of a dream, a consolidated memory. But you are experiencing them as if they are declarative memories."

"So what are they?" she asks, stifling a yawn. "If they haven't happened, how am I remembering them?"

"It's unclear. As you said, you never presented a psionic manifestation of the x-gene, and I don't detect any changes in that - though we could always do a more thorough testing if you'd like to be certain. But that doesn't prevent you from receiving the memories from someone else, or perhaps being affected by events that should have happened but did not."

That makes even less sense. "You're saying I'm dreaming - there should really be giant robots rounding us all up into camps?" That Jean should be dead? That mutants should be hunted and feared and hated?

The Professor shakes his head, looking at her steadily. "Remember your quantum physics, Kitty. Some theorists believe all our choices create separate universes, branching away from each other."

"And I've got a special window into the bad choices when I'm sleeping?" Kitty scowls. This is too much to deal with before she's finished her coffee.

"It's a possibility." He gives her a smile that's entirely too pleased with the sidelong pun he's just made, and Kitty groans because it's expected of her. "Would you like to continue our discussion over a cup of tea, perhaps?"

"I'd like to know how to make them stop," she grumbles. The Professor moves away anyway, going to fill up the kettle and getting out the tea, but he's smiling. 

"I think we'll be able to find a way."

And they do, sort of. Jean listens carefully to Kitty's explanation and tells her to start with over-the-counter sleep aids. Those just make the dreams loopy and surreal instead of apocalyptic and terrifying, but there's still plenty of death. Watching the blood cascade out of a torn throat or the spasms of someone being shocked for disobedience isn't any better in candy colors or with melting limbs that swirl into the drain. Then she tries prescription medication, and Kitty has the blissful peace of nights without any dreams at all.

Except those pills turn her into a total zombie, leaving her sleeping for ten, twelve, fourteen hours at a time. And Kitty can't keep sleeping through class, not if she wants to pass or keep her scholarships. She hates feeling so fuzzy-headed and confused all the time and yawning all day. After the time she phases through a desk and falls onto the floor Kitty gives up and throws the pills away. She'll take the creepy dreams over failing out of school, at least for now. 

Besides, college is fantastic. She doesn't have a curfew or a team of adults who are kind of her friends but definitely her teachers and authority figures. She doesn't have nearly as many rules. She's in the middle of a city with millions of other people and a bodega on every block and dozens of places to get pizza without having to bum a ride and drive like twenty minutes to get there. She has people around who haven't known her since she was thirteen and tiny - well, tinier - and the world's most annoying dork. There are definitely people who find her annoying here, but there are so many other people that she can meet a ton of them until she finds the ones she wants to be her friends. 

Sure, there are fewer mutants. But they exist too. There's even multiple student groups for the mutant population - Kitty tries going to a meeting of the student chapter of the Mutant Liberation Movement, which is a little militant for her taste, but she finds she really likes COMMA, even if it does have a really stupid name.

"What, you don't like Columbia Organization for Mutants and Mutant Allies?" Doug asks her when a few of them are out for dinner, one night after a meeting. He's kind of a dork, in the same way she is, and they were delighted to discover that they were both from Salem Center and somehow hadn't met each other yet.

"Well, first of all, someone was trying way too hard to make up an acronym," Kitty says. Doug grins and she throws a wadded up napkin at him before he can start talking again. "And second, I really don't know that we need to have allies right there in the name."

"It's a legacy of the old days," says Xi'an, stealing a couple of fries off Kitty's plate. Kitty lets her, because Xi'an is clever and ironic and gorgeous and Kitty maybe has a crush on her. "When they needed everybody possible to show up to the meetings." She shrugs. "I don't think it really matters, but you could probably submit a motion to change the name. Then we'd have to debate, and that could take weeks. And I don't think you have the patience for that."

Kitty shoves Xi'an with her shoulder, just a little, and grabs one of the olives Xi'an has tidily discarded on the side of her plate. "Enough personal criticism, okay, I thought we were here for dinner and not a Kitty Pryde Personality Intervention."

The talk turns back to the meeting they just attended, to the History of Mutant Rights course that Dr. MacTaggert is teaching in the spring and how MacTaggert totally used to work for the CIA or something before she got into academia, everybody knows that, to whether or not the MLM is going to be able to get Mystique to show up for the demonstration they're planning, and then onto regular gossip and complaining about roommates and classes and making so much noise the whole group gets a very stern lecture from the manager and leaves with a chorus of laughter. Kitty falls into bed that night with a smile on her face and the feeling that she's found somewhere she really belongs. 

_Mutants don't belong anywhere. Kitty's learned that, in her time on the run. She's been in town after town, sneaked across state lines and over borders in the dead of night, broken mutants out of internment camps in more than one country. There are a few safe havens, here and there, but no more than a house or a single street. And that never seems to last for long._

_She finds friends along the way, fellow sufferers. Fellow survivors. She loses them too. Kitty tries to track down the other Xavier's students, the professors who taught her how to use her power. Xavier is somewhere out there, she's heard, but nobody seems to be able to pin him down. Magneto might as well be a ghost, the greatest symbol of the failed cure now wreaking havoc on the humans where he can._

_But Kitty doesn't have time to waste on trying to find them. All she can do is stay alive for another night, steal a few more days for the mutants locked up behind the Sentinels' watchful gaze. All she can do is keep moving._

 

The dreams become almost comforting, in a weird way. At least she never has to worry about what she's going to dream about. No embarrassing fantasies about her friends, no nightmares where she's naked in the classroom and meant to be taking an exam she never prepared for, no weird dreams about celebrities helping her unicycle across the Hudson. She always knows what she's going to get, another vivid installment of the hellish story her mind insists on unspooling every night. Kitty starts writing them down in the mornings, a way to purge her brain so that she can get on with the rest of her day - she always seems to be taking more than a full load of classes, plus she winds up as one of the board members for COMMA and starts going to the Hillel meetings on top of her work-study job in the computer labs - and it seems to help.

She starts marking her life by the things that happen when she's asleep as well as when she's awake. Her first time with a girl, fumbling in a narrow dorm bed; her first time taking down a Sentinel, phasing through its processing core and ripping out its guidance system. Her graduation day, her parents warily tolerating each other's presence and a huge crowd of Xavier's alumni and faculty cheering Kitty's name; the day the little band of mutants gathered from across the globe looks to her as their leader, asking for her plan to defeat the Sentinels. The day she arrives back at Xavier's with her newly minted teaching certificate, no longer just Kitty but now Ms. Pryde, computer science and mathematics teacher; the day she sits down with Professor X and Magneto to chart out the details of a plan so ambitious and foolish it might just be able to save mutantkind. The things that happens when she's asleep have always seemed just as real as those happening when she's awake. Kitty finds it makes it a little easier to accept that the dreams will apparently never go away.

That acceptance doesn't make it any easier to watch her friends and family die in her dreams, over and over again, slightly different every time. It doesn't make more sense when the same events seem to happen with tiny variations night after night, not until she finally hears someone say _time travel_ in one dream, and even then it's still frustrating to follow. It doesn't make her eager to fall asleep as the world seems to get darker and darker every night, back at the school where she grew up, tucked away in her single staff bedroom. 

The visions get worse and worse, painfully vivid and leaving her exhausted in the mornings. Kitty can't help thinking that it has to stop somehow. That maybe going back on the drugs wouldn't be so bad. 

And then there's a night where she lies down and dreams _that she is sitting above Logan, struggling to hold him in the space between times, her mind and body taut with the strain, and he's slipping out of her grasp, the power that holds him starting to fray,_ and when Kitty wakes in the middle of the night her head still aches, and when she falls back asleep _he lashes out and she can't hold him and phase at the same time and his claws go right through her with a sickening noise and a white-hot flare of pain,_ and Kitty jerks awake again doubled over, heaving for breath, and every time she falls back to sleep it's nothing but _pain and anger and fear and the Sentinels are coming, the sounds growing closer, screams and explosions outside the door of the temple and Bobby struggling to hold it closed as Erik lies crumpled beside the table, and she struggles to hold on, praying to every god and every name she knows that Logan can do it, that this is going to work, the booming outside the door growing louder and louder and --_

There's a knocking on her door. Kitty flinches awake, struggling against the sheets that have tangled themselves around her middle, then phasing through them to sit up and swing her legs over the edge of the bed. She feels that peculiar fuzzy emptiness that comes when pain suddenly vanishes.

"Kitty?" Piotr calls her name, then knocks again. Kitty walks over and phases her head through the door and he pauses, arm in mid-knock. 

"What is it?" She must look like hell, judging by his expression, but she didn't want to wait to put on pants.

"Katya." He's still looking at her, worried, but his voice is much softer now. "You missed breakfast. And your class begins in fifteen minutes. Do you need me to cover for you?"

Kitty curses quietly. "No. Shit. Um, can you just collect homework and get them started on the problem set of the day if I don't make it there by the start of the period?" She feels awful, hungover, but she isn't technically sick and she doesn't want to miss class to lie in bed and go back to that dream. 

Class is grueling, but she makes it through and runs downstairs to grab some toast before second period, and the rest of the day passes in a blur of lessons and homework and accidental manifestation of phytokinesis and questions and corrections and everything that makes up a normal day at Xavier's. She's so busy, and trying so hard to not just lie down under her desk and whimper, that it's the end of the school day before she happens to see Logan.

When he sees her he goes absolutely still, his face twisting in - she's not actually sure. Fear? Pain? It looks like… well, it looks like the face he was making when he was stretched out on that table in her dream, suspended between the present and the past. 

"Logan?" she asks, setting down her soda. "What's up?"

As usual, Logan looks like he would rather chew glass than have a conversation. Kitty gives him a look. "What, do I have something on my face? I know I look like shit, but you normally don't look at me like you've seen a ghost."

Logan flinches at that. "Nothin'," he mutters. 

Kitty stares. "Okay, I would have just let it go, but that is the most obviously not-nothing answer you could have given. What's wrong? Somebody try to kill you again?" Logan's long list of enemies isn't exactly a secret, even if the more colorful details of his past are often obscure. The staff jokes about it sometimes, like teasing about exes. "Or is someone going to kill me? Because I dreamed last night that a bunch of killer robots were going to murder us all while I tried to send you back in time, so nothing is going to top that." She's so exhausted that the words just spill out, even though she normally doesn't tell anyone about her dreams. But it shouldn't matter. It can't even be in the top ten weirdest things Logan's heard. This week.

But that makes Logan scrub his face with one hand, and then he actually reaches over and grabs her wrist and hauls her out of the kitchen. Kitty doesn't scream but she does ask him what the hell he's doing, stumbling after him as he drags her to - to Charles's office. 

Well, that wasn't what she expected. Charles is sitting behind his desk, writing out a lecture in longhand. She still thinks of him as the Professor sometimes, even though they're technically colleagues, and when he's sitting behind that desk it's hard to shake the habit. 

"Logan, are you still -- ah. Kitty. What is it?" Charles looks up at them, his face perfectly placid even though Logan's sweating and Kitty knows she must look baffled and maybe a little frightened. 

"She knows about the Sentinels, Chuck. And the time travel. Said she dreamed it." Logan isn't one to mince words, and Kitty can see something change in Charles's expression. "I thought you said no one else remembered.

"I think perhaps you'd better close the door," Charles says, and Kitty does. She sits down in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk, waiting for Logan to sit and trying not to feel like she's fourteen and in trouble again. 

"Kitty. You told me once that you had nightmares. Would you mind telling Logan about them?" Charles says. Kitty takes a deep breath and turns to Logan and starts talking. About the dreams that started when she was thirteen, dark dreams of a darker world where mutants were hunted and terrorized and feared, dreams in which they lost everything they'd built and everything they'd ever had. She looks at his familiar face as she tells him how she's had them for years, how there was no way to stop them. She watches Logan's eyes as she talks about the Sentinels and the camps and the raids and the last-ditch effort to save mutantkind from the worst possible fate. 

Kitty recounts the dream she had last night, her voice creaking a little when she admits she doesn't remember most of the details because of the pain, and trails off. "The Sentinels broke in, and then… I woke up."

"It's all there," Logan says. There's a note of wonder in his voice. "All of it. You know all of it. How does she know?" And now he's growling, looking at Charles, who remains implacable.

"How do I know what?" Kitty asks, frowning. She is too tired to grasp what seems obvious to the two men.

"It appears that Logan has been living in the alternate timeline you just described," Charles says slowly. "That you did in fact send him back to avert catastrophe in 1973. I met him then, under… strange circumstances. I didn't believe him at first, but Logan can be very convincing. He was successful, needless to say. And he came to me this afternoon to let me know that he had returned to the present day, as it were, from his adventures in the past."

"It was real?" Kitty can't believe this. "It - those dreams I've been having since I was thirteen are real?"

"Yes and no. The nature of your power and the manner in which you had to hold Logan in place across time appear to have caused… ripples, if you will, that emanated out across the separate timestreams. So you remember events that have never happened and will never happened but did happen to a different version of yourself." Charles looks almost delighted at how strange this sounds. Theorists. Kitty's head aches.

"So - she…" Logan fumbles for words, hands on his knees like he's trying to keep himself in place. "So she knows. She knows the whole thing." He turns to Kitty. "You told me no one would know about the changes. How do you know?"

"I'm not sure. But I do." Kitty reaches out, careful, and puts a hand on Logan's knuckles. She knows the blades are right there beneath the skin. She knows she can phase. She knows he won't hurt her. 

"She is the only one who remembers the future you've come from," Charles says. "I admit, I don't think anyone could have anticipated that she would, or that the memories would have manifested in dreams."

Kitty turns back to Charles. "And you -- you knew this whole time. All that talk about quantum possibilities and alternate universes -- You knew he'd been sent back in time, that things were supposed to be worse. He must have told you about the Sentinels, about what had happened to us. And you never told me? I thought I was losing my mind, Professor."

"But you weren't," he says simply. "And if I'd told you and you'd sought out Logan - what good would it have done? He didn't know yet. He wouldn't have been able to help you, any more than I would have."

"That's bullshit and you know it," Kitty says, standing. "You could have told me something. You could have done more."

And she turns and leaves, eyes stinging, not stopping till she's outside and sitting on that same bench. Ororo's irises have come in beautifully this year. They're a nice distraction from all the confusion and anger churning in Kitty's stomach. She knows she's being unfair but she's so tired and her head aches so badly and it's like everything she knew about the world has been turned inside out.

She doesn't look up when a long shadow falls over the flowers. 

"You know he's right," Logan says. 

Kitty groans, burying her face in her hands. "I thought I was crazy, Logan. That I was sick."

"But you weren't," he answers, as if that makes it all better. "Besides, wasn't worse than anything I've thought of. Or half the things I've actually done." And Kitty knows he's come back from actually living through that hell, not just catching glimpses of it in dreams. Anything she has to say would sound unbelievably petulant. So she just sighs.

There's another long pause. By now she's used to them when dealing with Logan. His hand falls on her shoulder and she looks up at him. There's something warm and gentle and astonishingly sincere about his expression.

"Kitty?" he says, haltingly. 

"Yeah?"

"Thanks."

"For what?" 

"For - all this," he says, gesturing at the grounds, at the school. "I may not remember how it got this way, but I remember you fighting all those years, and I remember you sending me back. I know what you did for me. For all of us. That was you."

Kitty swallows. "But it wasn't."

"It was," he says, voice gruff and as quiet as Logan ever gets. "You remember it, don't you?"

Kitty looks out over the garden, at the mansion that's been her home for so long, at the school that taught her to be mutant and proud. "Yeah. I think I do."

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks once again to @pocky_slash for the lightning-fast beta!


End file.
